In 2015, Iqbal Khan was on top of the world. The 34-year-old finance wunderkind, who had moved from Pakistan to Switzerland when he was just a teenager, was promoted to head of international wealth management at Credit Suisse, the global investment bank. “Even Khan was shocked” by his fast ascension, writes Duncan Mavin in his … Read more
All through the 1950s and 1960s, as I grew up in Fair Lawn, my beloved hometown in northern New Jersey, almost every one of our immediate neighbors, the dozens of families around our block and those nearby, was, like us, Jewish. Over here, likewise housed in split-level colonials on quarter-acre plots, lived the Fishmans, the … Read more
Muriel White did not set out to be a hero. She was an American heiress who — like many other US debutantes at the turn of the 20th century — married a European aristocrat. Then the Nazis came. American heiress Muriel White on her wedding day in 1909 to Count Hermann “Manni” Seherr-Thoss. Paul Church … Read more
On May 2, 1945, just a few days before World War II ended and two days after Adolf Hitler committed suicide, Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers surrendered to American soldiers. “The grizzled GIs who received von Braun’s surrender were skeptical of the urbane, self-assured German’s claims,” write Emily Carney and … Read more
Of course, the one time Vivien Leigh played someone “normal,” she went insane. Leigh specialized in portraying mad women: Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, and the deranged and damaged Blanche du Bois from “A Streetcar Named Desire.” But in 1953 she agreed to star in the movie “Elephant Walk,” about a young bride who follows her husband … Read more
Evolution is a process that can take many millennia, if not longer. For a scholarly organization like the Yiddish archive and cultural institution YIVO, the process only took a century. YIVO (the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Yiddish Scientific Institute) marks its 100th anniversary in 2025 and one would be forgiven for thinking that the birthday … Read more
Why are some people happier than others? And how can we improve our quality of life? Those are the two main questions I have been trying to answer for more than a decade. I run the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen — and, no, we don’t have unicorns or chocolate fountains in the office. We … Read more
Jimmy Lai could have fled Hong Kong when the Communists arrived in 1997. Hundreds of thousands of his fellow Hong Kongers did, making for the friendlier shores of Canada, Australia, and the United States. But the billionaire entrepreneur, publisher of the former British colony’s leading newspaper, the Apple Daily, decided to stay behind instead and fight … Read more
After being shot in both legs by a Hamas sniper in Gaza, Israeli reservist and New York native Aaron Bours is among the many soldiers pioneering the use of cutting-edge rehabilitative technologies that have been a result of Israel’s war with Hamas. Bours, now 34, moved from Long Island to Israel as a teenager to … Read more
Wait. Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah fall on the same day this year? December 25th! Thank God! Finally! Can we please keep this up?! My extended family is a mishmash of Jews and Catholics, all committed to their own customs and traditions. At long last, we can stop running to different homes to … Read more
All Fours “All Fours” is written by Miranda July. Miranda July (Riverhead Books), $29July’s second novel is a story that’s at once eminently relatable to women over 40 and utterly unique. A mom and married artist plans to drive from LA to New York, where she’ll splash out on a stay at the Carlye and … Read more
In January 1981, Marta Falcon, mother of “Cocaine Cowboy” Willy Falcon, was kidnapped with a $500,000 ransom demanded for her release, as T.J. English explains in “The Last Kilo: Willy Falcon and the Cocaine Empire That Seduced America” (William Morrow, out now). For Falcon, the head of Miami’s Los Muchachos drug traffickers, the money was … Read more
There are two reasons to write a business book, according to Brad Stone, author of “The Everything Store.” You’re either writing a thriller or a how-to-manual. In “The Nvidia Way,” veteran technology journalist Tae Kim manages to do both. Kim charts the improbable rise of Nvidia from a fledgling three-person ‘90s era graphics chip startup, … Read more
It was April 7, 2004, and Nacoça Pio was one of the first to learn of the bloodbath. A leader of the Cinta-Larga — an indigenous tribe who for centuries lived in isolation in the Amazon Rainforest of Brazil — Pio knew that tensions were high between his people and the white diamond prospectors who … Read more
The owners of Plus Bus Boutique, a Los Angeles consignment shop that buys and sells plus-size fashions, noticed something odd this past summer. “We’ve had an alarming amount of the larger sizes coming in,” says co-owner Marcy Guevara-Prete. With Americans eating less thanks to the new class of weight-loss drugs, retailers are anticipating losses in … Read more
Edna Ferber did not want James Dean to play Jett Rink, the brutish ranch hand turned dissolute millionaire oil magnate from her 1952 novel “Giant.” ‘ She had imagined someone brawnier for the movie adaptation. At least someone more famous! Dean was a 24-year-old angel-faced ingénu whose film debut (in the 1955 drama “East of … Read more
ART Cats of the World Hannah Shaw and Andrew Marttila (Plume), $45Marttila’s “Shop Cats of New York” showed off Gotham’s cutest cats. Now he and his wife Shaw — known as The Kitten Lady on social media — have turned their lens on kitties around the globe, from Turkey to South Africa. Cone of Shame … Read more
E.A. Kahane was hooked on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade long before she saw it in person. The native New Yorker and a group of friends gathered annually at West 72nd Street and Central Park West the night before to watch the parade’s beloved oversized balloons being inflated. “It was an evening that we wouldn’t … Read more
Acting is an infamously insecure vocation. This applies just as much to gaining a foothold as sustaining an A-lister’s star career. One slip – one flop – and you can tumble into the mud. Fresh off winning an Oscar for Best Actress, ‘Catwoman” gave Halle Berry a multi-million paycheck; but was considered by critics one … Read more
“Who lives next door to you?” asks psychologist and true crime expert Emma Kenny in “The Serial Killer Next Door: Chilling True Stories of the Killers Hidden Among Us” (Mobius). “Perhaps a friendly postman or a businessman in a sharp suit? These are the faces you recognize, individuals as ‘ordinary’ as you or me. But it’s … Read more